In other words, can we choose to become healthy cells, entraining other cells and spreading a culture of wholeness, well-being and peace?
I believe this is the only way life on our planet has any hope of transforming and regenerating. It is up to each of us to become the whole new human and to live the dream of a whole new world, no matter how challenging the prospect.
Today I will be delving into how a fragmented state of mind is a legacy of the old controlling paradigm and why it’s so hard to shift the old conditioning. And then in future posts I will be exploring creativity as a vehicle for healing and transformation.
But before I go there I’ll start with a description of how wholeness feels to me and how it feels to fall out of wholeness. In this last week I’ve experienced both.
A state of wholeness for me is very simple. I’m just here fully, 100% present with, and absorbed in, my experience. I feel at one with life, at home in myself, embodied and embedded in the world; there’s no part of me doubting or criticizing or wishing I was somewhere else. And because I’m present I have clear access to wisdom, intuition, inspiration and inner guidance. Action arises spontaneously and I’m in creative flow. Even when experience is difficult or challenging there’s a vibrant intensity to it; If disagreement arises between me and another, I may be frustrated or irritated but I see it as something arising in the field between us to be resolved or healed rather than projecting blame or self-blame. In this state I feel fulfilled because every moment is full and each day is a smorgasbord of gifts and evolutionary opportunities to be unwrapped, tasted, played with and enjoyed.
Falling out of wholeness feels like a fall from grace. I experienced it this week after I moved out of my comfort zone and into a new and more challenging situation. I could feel myself contracting, an edge of fear, anxiety and doubt creeping in. Because part of me was off making plans for the future it was harder to stay present and more challenging to stay focused on my creative pursuits. I felt more distracted, less well emotionally and physically, less happy, less at home. Although this was a fairly mild shift it was enough to feel the duality – rather than being at one with life, there was now me and life as a problem to be solved. It’s a subtle shift but it makes all the difference.
Have you experienced this yourself? How does being at one with life feel to you? And how do you feel when you’re not fully in alignment?
For many of us this is the journey of evolving consciousness – to live more of our time in wholeness and less in separation. It’s a process directed by the breath of life, in which expansion is followed by contraction and then by further expansion. And with each in and out breath we get to see more clearly and know more fully what the journey is and what it requires of us – where we need to let go, when we need to be more open, when to act and when to surrender.
Experiencing our wholeness means being open to receive all kinds of nourishment and being in the flow of receiving and giving back. In my last post I explored how many of us have closed our hearts and minds to shield ourselves from life and I want to take this deeper now to see how this is a cultural pattern which takes enormous commitment to transform:
The Inter-generational Story of Abuse and Trauma
I’m sure it’s true to say that the majority of people in the world have been subject to abuse of some kind at one time or another and many billions of us right now, this minute, are subject to ongoing abuse. Abuse can range from living in a household in which anger and violence are common; being subject to ongoing criticism or ridicule, bullying and cruelty of all kinds; sexual molestation – through to the wholesale abuses of war, genocide and ecocide.
Abuse causes trauma and trauma causes dissociation from body, soul and life itself. Until it is healed trauma lives on in the body and is re-activated. Trauma teaches us to distrust life, to fear others and to believe there is something essentially wrong with us and these beliefs operate at an unconscious level and are so deeply ingrained they feel normal. The earlier the abuse occurs the more deeply buried these unconscious beliefs are and the more they wreak havoc with our lives and undermine our attempts at happiness and wholeness. In other words as long as the trauma remains untreated we are unconsciously reproducing the old paradigm culture through our limited self image, thought forms and behaviour.
Abuse – the impulse to control and dominate others – is passed down from generation to generation and through the culture. At the heart of psycho-spiritual endoctrination during the long patriarchal era has been the myth of Original Sin embedding deep down in the psyche the belief that we are not worthy, that liveliness, autonomy and connection with our inner divinity are “sinful” and will be surely be punished. See: The Biggest and most Common Blocks to Creativity
We take on this identification with unworthiness from our parents and the significant adults in our childhood – and our parents inherited it from their parents. We may experience the energy of abuse in utero or take it in with our mother’s milk. When family conflict flares at meal times – as it did on my family – taking in nourishment can get confused with tension, fear, shame and guilt and lead to all sorts of eating disorders, food obsessions and distorted self-care patterns.
We take in the life denying culture at school, through the media and then there is the violence broadcast through the media and internet games:
“By the time an American child is eighteen, it will have seen two hundred thousand acts of violence and forty thousand murders on television.” (From The Dream of the Cosmos by Anne Baring)
And of course there’s the escalating trauma to the Earth, nature and the other species with which we share the planet. And the centuries old and ever-increasing abuses of war, the battles for resources and the repression of women and soul which have been part of global culture for 4000 years.
These are some very heavy, deeply rooted historic, cultural and psychological forces acting to keep us captive and powerless in the old paradigm of dominance and violence. And whether we choose to focus on it or not, all of this is very alive and kicking in our world and each of us has to decide how to live with that knowledge without repressing or denying aspects of our liveliness and experience. To fully take in the magnitude of the trouble our species is in is heartbreaking and crazy making and all of us, to one degree or another anaesthetize ourselves against this terrible knowledge.
It’s part of the human condition to have our heart’s broken and it’s the broken heart that learns empathy and compassion – two of the essential qualities that can transform us. As well as the global catastrophe there are private tragedies – maybe we loved someone who couldn’t love us back or we lost a child or soul mate to death, or a dear friend or family member betrayed and deeply disappointed us. Such experiences challenge us to keep the heart open and to stay trusting, open, vulnerable and fully alive.
Even when we have been lucky enough to be free of abuse in this lifetime we carry the memory of generational cultural abuse in our genes, in our DNA, in our cellular and soul memory, in the old reptilian brain. As we awaken to soul life these ancient unconscious collective soul memories are activated. And if we are awake and aware we have the opportunity to transform them for our species.
I’m sure none of the above is news to you but I have gathered it together here as a way of sketching the immensity of what we are up against when we pursue personal and cultural transformation. The old paradigm is a culture of separation, isolation, dominance, violence, control and power over others, which we have all internalized into our psyches. When we take any steps to free ourselves from these deeply engrained cultural conditioning, we are committing radical acts of empowerment for ourselves and on behalf of the collective.
Each time we enter the wounds to the heart and soul and lay bare the lie of our unworthiness, we redeem a little bit of consciousness and free a little bit of love. And each time we do this we take another step towards the new culture of radical responsibility, unconditional love and interconnected wholeness.
